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by Mike Clark

The chart shows the approximate number of words in each chapter of Pragmatic Project Automation per week. The latest numbers are highlighted—mouse over prior weeks to see their figures.

Pragmatic Project Automation shows you how to improve the consistency and repeatability of your project’s procedures using automation to reduce risk and errors.

Simply put, we’re going to put this thing called a computer to work for you doing the mundane (but important) project stuff. That means you’ll have more time and energy to do the really exciting—and difficult—stuff, like writing quality code.

Out of Print

This book is currently out of print.

About this Book

176 pages

Published: 2004-07-01

Release: P3.0 (2005-11-24)

ISBN: 978-0-9745-1403-1

With this book, you will:

Discover how automation saves you time and money

Learn to use common, freely available tools to automate build, test, and release procedures.

Learn effective ways to keep on top of problems for the whole team

Use automation to create better code

See how to create and deploy releases easily and automatically
Explore techniques that let programs monitor themselves and report problems

This is a book by programmers, for programmers. This isn’t the sort of automation used to make backups or process your payroll. This is automation for the rest of us

Contents and Extracts

About the Author

Mike Clark is an author, speaker, consultant, and most importantly, he’s a programmer. He is co-author of Bitter EJB (Manning), editor of the JUnit FAQ, and frequent speaker at software development conferences.

Mike has been crafting software professionally since 1992 in the fields of aerospace, telecommunications, financial services, and the Internet. In addition to helping develop commercial software tools, Mike is the creator of several popular open-source tools including JUnitPerf and JDepend. Mike helps teams build better software faster through his company, Clarkware Consulting, Inc.

Comments and Reviews

Once again, the Pragmatic team has written exactly what working programmers need. Doing the things this book describes saves each member of our team hours of grief and frustration every time we do a release. Overall, I think this is an excellent addition to the lineup—it’s valuable stuff, and the writing and examples are very clear.

—Greg WilsonHewlett-Packard

If you’ve ever hoped to find a technical book that gave solid, usable examples that you can apply in real life rather than just throwing lofty-sounding buzzwords about, then this book is it. This book is full of solid, down-to-earth advice from one of our industry’s thought leaders. Everything in this book is relevant and practical (pragmatic even :-) and will aid every project that takes it’s advice to heart. This book will be mandatory reading on all of my projects from this time forth. I unreservedly and wholeheartedly endorse this book.

—Simon P. ChappellTechnical LeadLands' End, Inc.

If your software project is not automated you are wasting time and money every day, and I can’t think of a better, more thorough, or more practical book to get you started on that path than Mike Clark’s Pragmatic Project Automation.

—Alberto SavoiaCTOAgitar Software Inc.

I’m going to staple this book to my desk, so it doesn’t ‘disappear’.

—David RuppSr. Software EngineerGreat-West Life & Annuity

I’ve always been a tool-builder. When a solvable problem presents itself, I like to fix it with the simplest possible solution. This book—fun and interesting to read—is a wonderful collection of tips and tricks that will help you take simple everyday tools and do amazing things with them. By the time you are done reading it, not only will your builds be repeatable, but you’ll have industrial strength monitoring and troubleshooting tools in place as well. Mike stays one step ahead of you and builds a compelling case for each tool as well as how to combine them. And, in the end, you might even end up with a couple of lava lamps out of the deal.

—James Duncan DavidsonCreator of Ant

From the minute I learned about the Pragmatic Starter Kit, this book was the one I was most eager to read. Now that I’ve read it, it’s the one I’m most eager to recommend. Pragmatic Project Automation is packed with the basics of how to employ automation in your development projects (plus exciting glimpses of more advanced techniques). Best of all, Mike’s book shows clearly that automation is part and parcel of good software engineering: well-designed systems lend themselves to automation, and automation helps us build good systems.

—Glenn Vanderburg

Where has this book been all my life?! Mike Clark’s clear, concise, and fun style has me on the edge of my seat eager to find out what trick is next. His CruiseControl RSS publisher is already in action on my projects, and even more of these gems are working their way into my routine. Lava Lamps and Groovy—the hippest software book ever!

—Erik HatcherCo-author of Java Development with Ant and Lucene in Action

This book has all the essentials and sticks to the subject at hand, highly recommended!